but after looking around we decide that we must leave it just as it is, recognising
that, in this case, even the dust has its place’ (Wittgenstein, cited in Janik and
Toulmin 19 7 3: 20 7 ).
Ghosts
How, then, might we find a space for my father? This is the question I want to
ask in this chapter. But to ask it requires a consideration of the politics of what
Phelan (1993) calls the ‘unmarked’, that, is, an attempt to find, value, and retain
what is not marked as ‘here’, yet palpably still reverberates; invisible dust still
singing, still dancing. Phelan approaches this question of disappearance through
a psychoanalytical perspective.^2 As will become clear, my approach is a rather
different one, based upon valuing practices in and for themselves. But I believe
that we are searching for the Sonic. As she puts it ‘by locating the subject in what
cannot be reproduced within the ideology of the visible, I am attempting to
revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not visibly representable’
(Phelan 1993: 152).
Champagne without fizz
One of the ways in which I have tried to understand the world in which my father
lived and, I believe, still has agency is through actor-network (or actant-rhizome)
theory. My project has many affinities with actor-network theory, as will become
clear in this chapter (see Thrift 1996).^3 Most especially I like its emphasis on the
agency (or, rather, actancy) of objects and the rhizomatic multiplicity of space-
times formed and maintained by them. Again, I like actor-network theory’s
emphasis on invention, rather than reflection; ‘ANT [actor-network theory]
keeps adding to the world and its selection principle is no longer whether there is
a link between account and reality – this dual illusion has been dissolved away –
but whether or not one travels’ (Latour 199 7 : 1 7 8). And I like the corresponding
sense of a distributed and always provisional personhood that arises from actor-
network theory; an ‘envelope’ of sideways movements that never add up but arise
out of performances whose competence is deduced after the event and so become
a part of an institution. However, I also find that, for my purposes, actor-network
theory poses some quite severe problems: in certain ways this chapter can be seen
both as an elaboration of these problems and as a tentative resolution.
To begin with, for all its commitment to the ‘particularities of sites, the un-
predictability of circumstances, the uneven patterns of the landscape and the
hazardous nature of becoming’ (Henalf 199 7 : 7 2), there is a sense in which actor-
network theory is much more able to describe steely accumulation than lightning
strikes, sustained longings and strategies rather than the sharp movements that
may also pierce our dreams. Actor-network theory is good at describing certain
intermediated kinds of effectivity, but, even though fleet Hermes is one of its
avatars, dies a little when confronted with the flash of the unexpected and the
unrequited. Then, and I think this problem arises out of the first, actor-network
110 Part II